 Okay, once more, good evening, everybody. Welcome to the session, what has Red achieved? Empirica evidence for transformational change. Why are we here? Why are you here? If you have a fever, you go to the doctor, or maybe you pop an aspirin or something, and then if it doesn't get better, you go to the doctor. If it gets better, you don't go to the clinic. You still have the fever. After going to the clinic, maybe you start praying. But the important thing is you're acting on evidence. You have something that you measure, your fever, and you react to it and try to control this. So it's pretty simple. We humans do it all the time. And we are sometimes a bit surprised that we don't see this happening so much in policy processes. It's very rarely an assessment of policy impact. And that's what this session is about. Talking about the example of Red Plus. And so this is, I'm just going to introduce you to the session. My name is Christopher Matius. I'm a team leader for climate change in CIFOR, the Center for Tropical Forestry Research. And this session is jointly organized by us, together with the Independent Evaluation Unit of the Green Climate Fund and Wageningen University. We are very proud that we have this collaboration starting in small ways and in larger ways, working together on these important questions. And so we would like to share some of these results with you. And another partner in this is FAO, where we are also going to have the speaker. So the speakers are starting with Kamar Charing, who is the Green Climate Fund Board Member. And he's from Bhutan. We have Dr. Joe Puri, who leads the Independent Assessment Unit of the Green Climate Fund. And she's going to talk. We have Dr. Amy Duchel, who is my colleague in CIFOR, working on assessment of Red Plus projects. Then we have Dr. Martin, or Professor Martin Harold, from Wageningen University, also talking about the topic. And we have Margo Bushko-Briggs from FAO. So it's a long setup of speakers for this late hour. And we have Professor Harold Engelsen, Professor for Economy at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, who is going to moderate the session. And as I said before, we have a long list of speakers, so I'd like to ask all the speakers to keep to your time, please, so we don't eat up the time for discussion that is planned for the last half hour more or less. So we have somebody showing you here when you have two minutes to go and then when you are close to finishing. So please stick to the time. And with this, I'd like to hand over to Harold for the moderation. I'm just going to sit here. And I would like to add also, we have questions maybe coming in from an online audience to the session. And so we might, in the discussion, also refer to those questions. So if you're not sitting in the room but listening to this outside, please send us your questions through this Skype setup that is available. Thank you. Good afternoon. Chris has already introduced, so it's my privilege to be the moderator, not in the meaning of being moderate, but rather to ask the questions that you all wanted to ask, but don't dare to do. This is, as you know, a joint event between primarily C4 and the Green Climate Fund. C4, we are using this. I'm associated also with C4. Using this occasion to launch a new book, Transforming Red, that Amy, Christoph, myself, and three others have been contributing to as editors and also a number of 62 authors. The book is available on the back, and you may have a copy there, or of course view it online. I have a confession to start with. I was wrong when I got involved in red first cup 10 years ago in Poznan, here in Poland. I thought that after 10 years we would have a number of good impact studies. We would know does red work or not. We would know what policies work better than others. What type of projects work in which context? After 10 years, billions of dollars, and Norwegian crowner, we would know all this answer. And now we are here to take stock and maybe see I was wrong. We have far fewer. There are a few key questions that we cannot fully address or answer properly to guide us. We are here, however, to take stock and both of the work that we'll see presented here to see what do we know and where are we. And some of this, including this book, is kind of a critical analysis written by researchers that we want to be critical. And that's good. We should be critical about the implementation of red, but to read from the back of this, without losing sight of the urgent need to reduce forest-based emissions to prevent catastrophic climate change. So I think when we have this critical attitude to see what works or not, we have tested a few approaches, but that does not mean that we are critical to the objective of red, namely to reduce forest-based emissions. So with that, I'm happy to give the floor to the third speaker, who is a board member of the GLF, Karma Sering. But as Christopher also said, working with the National Environmental Commission Secretary of the great country of Bhutan. So, Mr. Karma, the floor is yours. And I encourage you to come here to speak. It's kind of more authoritative. Thank you. First of all, whenever I come to the podium, I feel like a politician. That's why I try to avoid coming to the podium to speak. Anyways, thank you. And thank you again to the Independent Evaluation Unit, the head of the Independent Evaluation Unit, Dr. Jopuri, who has been kind enough to give this opportunity to me to share some of my views. Please don't be disappointed to hear that when I say I'm not an expert on red plus, I'm not an expert on red plus at all. I'm here just to learn support as a member of the GCF board to this process since the red plus has also been introduced in GCF. Of course, in the context of the GCF, the red plus has been introduced just now to look at the mitigation. However, I think we have other elements which can also be done by the countries in terms of other areas like increasing in terms of the livelihood of the country and then communities and region, people's health. So these are some of the areas that we have been also trying to see how can be incorporated within the GCF portfolio for the red plus. The red plus project was launched in GCF sometimes in 2017 with the funding size of about 500 million project based on the first come first service kind of a thing for the countries to access the fund. Just now one of the areas that the GCF is also focusing is to some extent from our own perspective, it is also a learning perspective for member countries who are trying to get access from the GCF. We feel that there are lots of areas which is also already happening in the red plus by different donors and different expert agencies in terms of the support to different countries. For instance, in my own country, we have already now started quite a lot of assessment and now we have our own red plus strategy which is again needs to be implemented. My personal, as a member of the board and also having been in this process for last two years, I feel that member countries who are also trying to get access through the red plus has to be kind of proactive especially for accessing this fund from the GCF. But at the same time I think some of the member countries are also quite advanced in terms of their own developments in the red plus. So this is what the challenges that we are facing, especially in the LDC countries among the developing countries in terms of the red plus. I just wanted to cite one critical area of support that the Bhutan in particular is looking for in terms of getting the support is like in terms of trying to implement their own strategies of red plus. We have now already done the red plus strategy through the forest carbon partnership fund which was allocated to Bhutan. But saying this one of the area that Bhutan also has in terms of the challenges is the especially like many other developing countries among developing especially the LDCs the challenges is the expertise within the red plus. One of the, even within the GCF context we are also trying to clarify in terms of the so many definition in terms of criteria that has been put forward. For instance now we are trying to say we have this so-called paradigm shift which is required but we are also not very sure what it means in terms of the paradigm shift. There are different views that is being expressed. So these are some of the, from the GCF and the convention point of view which is also very much confusing for the member countries. These are some of the challenges but this is also to my view is the opportunity for country to look at how it is being viewed and how it is being implemented in the context of red plus. So finally I have not much to say as I was saying but I have come here to just to give the moral support of being a board member representing LDC. So I would like to stop here and I do not want to delay any further and not speak much on the red plus since we have experts who are here to deal on the red issue. Thank you very much. Thank you so much to get that perspective of GLF which is really going to be the kind of the main funding arm of UNFCC. Next speaker is Amy. You must switch a little bit to, because Joe's presentation will partly build on what Amy is. So Amy is a senior scientist at C4. She has been working on particularly M2, the module 2 that has tracked starting with 23 red projects and now we're doing a third wave of, not the full 23, a third wave of data collection on that. Great. Hi, I'm Amy Duchel as Arald said from C4 and I want to thank you all for being here tonight after a long day. What I'm going to talk about today is understanding what works in forest-based climate change mitigation from some of our experiences at C4 over the last 10 years. So as all of us know who are here today, we cannot stay below 1.5 degrees warming without forests, protection of forests, recovery of forests and sustainable forest management. And what we really want to know is what have different types of forest-based mitigation actions achieved so far to inform future efforts. And we argue at C4 that rigorous impact evaluation is needed. So rigorous impact evaluation of different types of forest interventions to really understand what works best, where, when, why and how much does this cost to be able to promote learning but also inform future efforts. When we say rigorous impact evaluation, we're really just talking about attributing an observed outcome to a given intervention, whether it's a policy, a program or an activity. So a really nice review of different types of forest conservation policies came out in plus one in 2016 and this was led by a colleague of ours at, his name is Jan Borner, he's a C4 senior associate and also a professor at the University of Bonn. And what they did was look at a variety of forest conservation policies ranging from protected areas to payments for environmental services, different kinds of law enforcement, so command and control measures and certification among others. And essentially the conclusion, I mean this graph isn't so easy to understand but basically they were looking at basically the percent of reduced forest loss because of these different intervention types using a quasi-experimental approach, so actually a counterfactual, trying to understand what was the actual effect of the intervention in a treated area versus a control area. And essentially the outcome or the conclusion of these studies, this collection of studies, was that effects are actually quite small, they are not super effective, let's say policies programs at least that were analyzed here and that there's a lot of variance of the effect, so the long whiskers that you see on some of these results show that they're sort of imprecise results. And so quasi-experimental approaches, there's very high internal validity because you're actually using a counterfactual, but what they found from these studies is that they were often case specific, so it was hard to take them out of the particular context where they were being applied to learn lessons for other contexts, and that would be external validity. And so then we tried to do a review of the Red Plus literature to understand what have we learned about Red Plus and especially in terms of some of the more global comparative studies and things like this, and essentially what you see here are different types of studies, so reviews, randomized controlled trials, quasi-experimental approaches, which are, so those are in red, randomized controlled trials, the quasi-experimental approaches, and then other case comparisons, and then at the bottom case reports, looking at different types of outcomes, so the carbon outcomes are in black, the non-carbon outcomes, like well-being, livelihoods, tenure are in kind of gray, and participation outcomes are in white. And something striking about this was the lack of studies that are experimental, the lack of ability to actually attribute an observed outcome to a given intervention, but then also a remarkable lack of focus on carbon or land use outcomes, especially given that that was the original primary focus of Red Plus, of course other co-benefits are as important, we would say, but it's interesting the lack of studies on carbon outcomes. So C4's global comparative study on Red Plus, I mean some of those, there's one randomized controlled trial, the graph before there was one randomized controlled trial, that's Jayachandra, many of you might know that study, it's from Uganda, it was on a PES program, and the other, basically the level down are the quasi-experimental, and most of those are actually coming from our work, which is impact evaluation of local Red initiatives on the ground. And so basically since 2010, we've worked in six countries, Brazil, Peru, Cameroon, Tanzania, Vietnam and Indonesia, and 22 initiatives in 150 villages and with 4,000 households. And essentially we collected data before interventions were happening in 2010, after, it wasn't actually after, it ended up being during in 2014, and then we've gone back this year to collect a third round of data in 2018 at a subset of the sites. And the idea here is that you're working in treatment and control areas to try to understand what the impact is of these given interventions. So what are some of the results so far? From our work, but also from the broader literature. Basically the few evaluations of local Red Plus initiatives on forest and land use outcomes show moderately encouraging results. And I should actually say that when we do these literature reviews, we were very open to any type of Red Plus initiative at any scale, but most of the literature has focused on these pilot projects. You know, there are strong limitations with the project approach. I think a lot of us know that. But the bundle of interventions that are being used at these local sites, ranging from payments for environmental services, alternative livelihood enhancements, tenure clarification, these kinds of interventions, it's important to understand what the impacts are because they could be used in higher level jurisdictional programs. So we did find actually moderately encouraging results of the few studies that focus on carbon and land use outcomes at the local level. Social and other environmental outcomes, we found that well-being effects were small with a mixed sign, but more likely to be positive when incentive components are included. I think this result is really important because we hear, you know, Red Plus is such a highly charged, ideological subject. And I think a lot of sides are saying, ah, Red is great for local people. Red is terrible for local people. And a lot of this is not necessarily based, it may be based on a site, or a really strong experience. But when we did this sort of broad study, these broad reviews, we actually see that the impacts have been small, overall on well-being, and more likely to be positive when there are incentives. Land tenure is still a persistent challenge. And interestingly, studies on biodiversity and adaptation outcomes are still extremely scarce. Finally, I want to highlight some new research on subnational jurisdictional approaches, and this is led by my colleague at Earth Innovation Institute, Claudia Stickler, who's sitting there, hi, Claudia. And this is promising research because what we've done is looked at nearly 40 subnational jurisdictions across the tropics, and basically found that most of these states and provinces have made very strong commitments to reducing deforestation. And most of them have put into place policies, programs, or initiatives of some kind towards reaching those goals. And the next step of that work that's already started is actually looking at the impacts and so assessing rigorously the impacts of certain interventions in the bundle on the outcomes that we're observing on the ground, both environmental and social. And Earth Innovation is organized in a site event on Monday, so please, where that report will be presented. So please go to that. So let me end with some of the take-away messages from our work. There's a need for more reliable evidence on the impacts of forest-based mitigation. Forests are critical. We need to know more about what works in terms of policies, programs, and initiatives. There are huge challenges in evaluating impacts in a rigorous way, especially in terms of real-world policy and programs that are constantly evolving. The choice of controls, if you're trying to do something quasi-experimental, the results are highly sensitive to how you choose your controls. There's a diversity of interventions. When you talk about Red Plus, it's not just payments for environmental services. It's many things. So how do you parse out the different effects of the different interventions in the bundle? And then how do you get at the real effects versus general noise of data? These are all huge challenges that researchers are struggling with. So we're calling for a scientific upgrade and impact evaluation. So really looking at the social and environmental impacts of a diversity of interventions in the same place. And this has been coined Conservation Impact Evaluation 2.0. I think this is the kind of information that we need as we move forward, especially with Red Plus at a jurisdictional scale. So thank you. Thank you so much. Kept your time. Joe Puré is head of the Independent Evaluation Unit of the Green Climate Fund and still have a problem with GCS and GCF. The one is the study, the other is the fund. So please, I'm trying to get your presentation. Thank you so much, Arald. I'm Joe and I work with the Independent Evaluation Unit and I'm going to talk about evidence in Paris and what's next. And right up front, I do want to say that I really appreciate the work that Arald and Amy and Christopher and C4 at large has done in looking at what works with respect to forestry and with respect to Red Plus. Mainly because this is something that we are trying to investigate and examine. Also at the Independent Evaluation Unit, not just with respect to forestry but with respect to a whole lot of initiatives that the GCF looks at. So today I'm going to look at two things. First, bias and the second thing is behavior. So let's talk about bias first. If I was to ask you what are the top few things that can help to individually reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Quick answers. I'll wait. I can wait. Vani, please don't count my time. It's theirs. So any answer, one answer. Flights, great. Anyone else? Meet. Yeah. So top four things that can help to individually reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Clearly having fewer children, living car free, avoiding a transatlantic flight. We are not doing very well and consuming a plant-based diet. And the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that you mitigate ranges from 59 tons per person per year if you have one fewer child to 29 tons per person per year if you consume a plant-based diet. And of course it varies by context. But I'm just saying averages. And so there's been a lot of studies but this particular study that was published in Nature basically looked at this experience in developed countries. So Australia, United States, Canada, et cetera. That's good. But guess what? Now let's look at what are the sorts of international policies or policies that we adopt at the international agency level when we are thinking about greenhouse gas emissions. Yeah? In any kind of evidence and evaluations, unfortunately we don't talk unfortunately about what is most effective. We talk about whether what we are doing is effective. So we already presume that the strategies that we are employing are already effective and we only look at whether the implementation of those strategies are effective. But clearly that needs to change. That needs to change because our paradigms are shifting very clearly and very manifestly. I mean the special report 1.5 is showing that our paradigm has changed. Why aren't we re-examining the strategies that we are using? So now to also speak to some of the points that Amy made. A couple of years ago my course looked at the evidence on land use and the impact that this has. So land use policies we looked at I don't need you to look at the slide. Don't try and make out what's in the fine print. It's fine print for a reason. I don't need you to read it. So we tried to look at some evidence and we tried to understand to what extent are area management techniques law and enforcement, incentives, training all of that helping to bring about a change in forest cover. Are these policies effective essentially? And we looked at everything that's going on in developing countries. And we looked at all of the evidence that we could count as good quality evidence. So the causal attribution that Amy talked about we looked at evidence that shows in a causal attributable way the evidence that's telling us whether our policies are working or not are only in developing countries and for all years ever. So what did we find? Again, so the little round bubbles essentially show you some types of evidence. But we basically found a headline message was we found 221 studies that qualified and these are in developing countries. So that's the one caveat. Only two studies looked at cost effectiveness. Amy spoke about how few studies there are in Red Plus that look at and there's one that uses randomized controlled trials to understand causal attribution. Guess how many in Red Plus actually include costs when they're trying to understand cost effectiveness? Zero. When you look at forestry studies only two studies at large really looked at cost effectiveness. So if you're a policy maker you have no idea what to do if you've got $10 to spend and you definitely don't know even for 0 to 0.5 standard effect size whether you should be spending it on forestry or something else. So that's not very good. And zero of those studies actually connected all of this with greenhouse gas emissions. And these are high quality studies and they don't look at far out outcomes. So first point is we have bias in what we produce and the kind of evidence that we produce and we have to start to change that. So my lesson one let's consider bias and how we produce evidence. Now I'm going to go to the second thing that I want to talk about which is behavior and ensuring that we measure the last mile. Science ladies and gentlemen is not enough. I know I'm saying this to the wrong audience. Okay but look at obesity, look at drug use look at smoking, look at alcoholism we all know that some things are bad. They're privately and personally bad and we still don't adopt behaviors that are personally good for us. Why do we expect people to change their behaviors when they're thinking about climate change? We have to start thinking about this in a very different way. So energy programs, recycling, taxes for energy etc, land use anything related to climate change, insurance policy programs. They all have something common to them. Let me give you an example of crop insurance. My co-authors and I looked at this a while ago and we looked at crop insurance which has been provided to small holder farmers in developing countries and we looked at all of the evidence again evidence review and we found that of the 50 studies that qualified in those studies the uptake of actually fair insurance policy so it was actually good for farmers to buy it from the insurance company the uptake was at a maximum 30 percent. If you basically cracked 30 percent you succeeded and then that fell off the attrition rate was even greater in the second year. So unless you provide incentives or really link it with other social programs farmers, small holder farmers do not want to buy insurance programs. Why is it that we keep thinking about these programs without thinking about the behavior change that it demands of them? So the key point here is that something happens in that last mile. There are policies and organizations putting policies out there and thinking about supply driven stuff but we have to start looking at that last mile. How do we change behavior? Okay. I'm going to... So addressing the last mile is really this is the work that's now been done by Richard Taylor, Kahneman, Tversky, etc. Nobel Prizes have been given and you're really pitting the cognitive part and the contextual part and you're thinking about how to change the choice architecture. How can we change that so that people are making the right decisions for themselves and making the right choices for themselves? I'm going to give you one example and this is of doctors. Doctors know that they have to wash their hands. Of course, who else would know that better? Right? Okay. So there was a study that was done in the 100,000 lives that were lost primarily because surgeons did not wash their hands going from one surgery room to the other. 100,000. That's significant. So what did these researchers from the University of Miami along with Imperial College of London do? They looked at installing hand sanitizers at the entrance of surgery rooms. Yeah? And they said, okay, well would that help? But then they also did something else. They installed they also constructed treatment groups. They put men's eyes on top of hand sanitizers. They also put women's eyes on top of hand sanitizers. And in the third treatment arm they sprayed lemon scent in front of surgery rooms. And guess what the impact was? So control group you install the hand sanitizer. Yes, hand sanitizing behavior went up by 15%. When you installed women's eyes photographs, it went up to 21 or 22%. Yeah, basically a 6 percentage point increase over the control group. With men's eyes it was definitely much more effective. Yeah? Than women's eyes. So about double. But sorry, when you look at spraying the lemon scent it triggers something off in your brain. With lemon you associate antiseptics and you associate cleanliness. And they ended up washing their hands increased to 47%. So we've got to start to think about things like that when we are thinking about the last mile. So there's a lot of work that's been done in this space. Think about how you can affect or change norms to change behavior. Work done by the behavioral insights team in London looks at how we use energy and comparisons between us and our people around us that we associate with definitely changes our energy behavior, energy use behavior. Okay? I know I have to make the last statement. One minute please. So think about some of the things that we can alter as we start to think about this. Change the default. In the United States what has been tried and tested now is if you change the default in organ donation and make that the default choice rather than the opt-in choice that has changed organ donors to 80%. So if we can do that for example getting renewable energy as the default choice and then non-renewable is the opt-in choice let's see how that works. Think about priming and the example here is smaller plates. Even if you're at a buffet table put smaller plates. People will eat less. Think about salience and the example here is having fruits closer to you and the donuts further away. That's just easier for you to reach out to the fruits rather than the donuts that are lying further away. And last thing is ego. So again behavioral scientists have looked at this and in the context of Halloween the little kids, one group the control group was not asked anything but they were just told please pick up only one piece of candy. Other groups were asked for their names and were asked for their addresses. The group that was asked their addresses and names were much more likely little kids were much more likely to pick up one piece of candy than the control group. If you put mirrors behind candy jars the little kids can see themselves they're much more likely to pick up one piece of candy than not. So basically let's think about the last mile and what changes behavior and my last two messages are think about a no regrets pathway. Consider bias in how we produce in news evidence and think about the last mile and what changes behavior. Thank you. Thanks a lot. So now we have some practical advice for example don't get more children I just wonder you have one less child I mean it depends on the reference point I have four fewer children and parents so I've done quite a good job there. Next speaker is from one of the partners of C4 namely Martin Harrell who is a professor of remote sensing and GIS at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Thank you very much good afternoon everyone is it actually on? It's also easy to understand on stage maybe I use this one It comes Hello? Yeah that's a bit easier at least I hear myself a bit louder So when we talk about red plus and we also talk about red plus achievements we also have to talk about data and open data and transparency and there is a lot of stuff that has happened since red came on and before I go into that in a bit more detail I would also like Amy remind us that this interest of forest related mitigation is basically as strong as ever with this IPCC 1.5 report with all the information we have and we have looked at that the forest sector is an important contributor to achieve the climate goals and it's actually a permanent one it's not different than any other sector to do that and we should really not overlook the opportunities there because sometimes we have to and I think we have moved beyond that so that's my starting statement We do know that the forest and the land sector is relatively complex too and that's where information is also coming to play a role that we talk about transformational change it requires engagement it requires information it requires assessment of performance and that is not only related to the things we talk about here but also the global stock tech where we have to kind of work out how these various sources of information have to come together to give us a general well a number on how close we are to 1.5 we have about transparency framework that we hope to hear much more about at the end of this COP but we also have to understand that information is very important and open sharing of information is important really to engage to really foster participation to jointly learn and to really help the accountability of stakeholders that are actually active in the land sector mitigation and so that is really where also data information play a role because we have been focusing a lot on really helping countries to bring their reporting capacities up to speed all of red plus countries have improved their capacities to use a variety of data sources to report to develop reference levels and these kind of things and that has been a great achievement what we have not seen a lot and that's what I would like to give three examples on is really how the data and some of the data sources are used beyond that specific course so the first example I'm going to give is about this is a map it's sample points so sampling or monitoring we do sampling which shows you the color shows you what is the land use that follows tropical deforestation so green and that's mostly in Latin America you see a lot of conversion to pasture in Africa you see a lot of orange colors which is basically smallholder agriculture and you see in Southeast Asia some pinkish colors which is tree crops or oil palm and so on so you're starting to really observe land use this is based on satellite data and you say this is great information it tells us about the drivers it tells us about the things that are happening on the ground but then you will look at the studies in countries on how such information has actually impacted debates and discourses about deforestation this information is not often picked up because there are often strong coalitions related to business as usual that have really dominated these debates so we have not really done very well on using that information and also for these purposes the IPCC could practice guidelines that the countries are using to report are just being revised updated and that's particularly important for red plus because the last update was 2006 basically before red plus came really saw the light of day so a lot of new input in these guidelines are related to what developing countries should be doing in terms of estimation and reporting one of the updates that are is also ongoing at the same time is to update these default values, so default values are information that can be used in absence of data in absence of national data they are used sometimes for technical assessments they are actually also used in the scientific literature also for local impact studies and so on and so all these tropical biomass and forest growth data have been updated and the nice point here is relatively open collaboration between research networks being countries providing data the FAO and UNVET providing data the World Bank partnership facility providing data to actually really do a good job in updating these numbers and so in an area where data sharing and open data remains an issue we see very positive signs that these partnerships are really starting to happen and really take advantage of all these data sources coming together and that's a very good sign and my last point is really related and that's also a satellite based tool when you have very frequent satellite data and there are some data from the European Space Agency that are related to the Copernicus program where you actually provide weekly information even in cloudy area such as Indonesia so this is a very good example of the data about VAL they provide weekly updates about what's changing so what you're seeing here this is an oil power plantation which is actually being harvested and regrown so what you're seeing mostly is actually land management this is not land use change this is land management but it points out that with these very dense time series data you start to track communities to use information not to report what's coming out at the end but to really track to near real time assess and even use that information for action to for example assess if there's anything illegal given a certain definition using it for enforcements and all these kind of things so basically to sum up open tools and data and data resources are really fundamental for enhancing transparency underpinning country capacities countries have used a lot of open source tools and data on stakeholder engagements and to support the accountability of stakeholders we have underused the available data for actually really assessing options assessing trade-offs and really looking at the implementation we had a lot of focus on actually reporting what we're expecting to come out so if we talk about transformational changes and using information to underpin these transformational changes we have to do much better there and the opportunities are there and to this idea of more spatially explicit tracking on what's happening is something that is becoming feasible. Thank you. Thanks a lot just on time last speaker I was I thought if I should introduce her as an Indigenous representative because it's the only Polish speaker in the panel but is a program officer with FAO and then the UN Red Program FAO is one of three partners in the forestry department so you have the floor and soon you will have the presentation. Good evening everybody. Good evening if there is anyone from Poland Good evening just to prove that I'm partly Indigenous so thanks a lot and first of all I'd like to congratulate C4 and all the authors and contributors for your new publications that's very impressive and thank you all for putting this interesting event together I'd like to contribute to this discussions which I think it's very timely to look into evidence of red plus and what in principle red plus achieved in terms of its catalytic role and transformation so a couple of observations on that from our perspective I represent the UN Red Program I'm going to tell you a little bit where we work and what we do and a little bit about the changes of 10 years of capacity building and capacity development on red plus and then a few takeaway messages from our side so just for those of you who may not be familiar with UN Red Program although I think that many of you are very familiar because it's not a new program we have been established as a response to UNFCCC decisions already in 2008 and this program is a partnership with the UNDP and UN Environment and with major support from Norway, Denmark, Japan, Luxembourg, Switzerland and the European Union it was actually believe me or not the first joint global UN program on climate change by the time when it was established in the size and the shape that it took we've been working in 64 partner countries and the time being the program first through quite large interventions in specific countries and a lot of smaller targeted interventions on capacity development in more than 45 countries has been now changing into somehow sort of a global knowledge hub related to technical issues now as this event is talking and dealing with the issue of evidence and also the issue of transformational change towards climate mitigation in the forest sector I think red plus when started when launched in 27 was actually meant to be very quickly transformational but today we know that achieving these results requires much time longer than it envisaged initially so a few words on this how we look at it and how the program the UN program was set up in its first phase for the first 10 years we've been working on red plus readiness phase phase one and we're supposed to finish this and accomplish and then help countries to develop all the capacities infrastructure have it sustainable and then move to implementation and results I think from our experience we can say and we've been trying to explain this on the graph is that this readiness phase in order to be sustained requires quite some more attention and the three phases of red can actually be happening in parallel and I'll tell you a little bit more on how we have looked at this capacity development and the evidence so in order to look specifically into one of the red plus readiness pillar national forest monitoring systems as you know data information transparent and reliable and accountable is a prerequisite for red plus and Martin can tell you a lot more about this in also in the previous presentation so all the red plus countries were supposed to develop sustained and firm national forest monitoring system and one of the pillars so we've looked into a 10 years of capacity development we've invested substantial amount of money into this and driven primary by a desire to understand what truly has changed and where are the gaps and why those gaps exist and how to fill in these gaps by targeted interventions I should also say that you know reporting on forest resources it's actually nothing new for FIO forest resource assessments countries were reporting to FIO for last 50 years but things has been changing during last 10 years substantially so here's one example and I'll show this graph on national forest monitoring system 10 years of capacity building so we looked at four pillars, satellite land monitoring system forest reference levels, those are the two higher bars here on the graph and then the two blue represent national forest inventory and national GG inventory systems so as you can see there are two issues, two messages that come out from this graph well first of all that there is a substantive progress in capacity development in countries and that it has grown quite rapidly from 2014-15 up to now and you can see also that satellite land monitoring system and forest emission levels were quite much higher than the national forest inventory and the other one the GG so now why is that why are those differences so big and also he's just in this similar message but just presented a little different in a different way why the progress in capacity development in national forest inventories or GHD was so slow I think that's quite an interesting issue for us as we want to know precisely how to then channel funds in a more targeted way and I think one of the feedback we've received is that the resource NFI obviously a resource intense and lengthy process and the developing countries have little prior experience so it's a pretty much experience from scratch exercise kind of thing also valuing national forest inventories is not always recognized so often seen as a foundation of organized forestry but only in direct relation to resource management in terms of GHD what the feedback we've received from many countries is that the GHD is really a focus of the UN Red Capacity building and not typically led by forest services so he is in an institutional problem because the two in the cross sectorial cooperation as the forest services dealing with the other pillars are mostly relevant in ministries of environment or forestry services while the GHD inventories are in different departments so this institutional kind of a bottleneck is really visible visible here but the overall conclusion is that the progress has been made and this study tells us and shows us that there are remaining gaps in capacity development and that we can direct this resources that are available in a strategic way to fill in those gaps where needed in terms of building this capacities. I want to show for example and this is an example which deals with some other elements of overall discussion on the definition of transformational change and also different elements of for example GCF investments criteria where you have an element related to scaling cap or replication here's an example of a simple intervention that was what you see on the slide it's Panama you know that most panaman forest almost 50% discovered through one third percent by indigenous territories of the 50% of the forest and we've been teaming up with some of those indigenous communities to actually use drones and some other technologies to monitor forest resources and to monitor actually other resources. The program proved to be very successful in terms of small intervention but very successful decisions were made by general congresses of indigenous peoples forest protection on managing resources and it's also a good example of sort of a bottom up approach in a small intervention that can be actually scaled up so there are a number of indigenous groups which I can list here but for the sake of time I know I have to finish it's sort of a good example of eventual elements that could be really scaled up and brought up through this bottom up approach so the issue is here also how to replicate, what's the replication potential and also from a program such as you and Red how can we sort of program such elements that can be scaled up at very early stages of our interventions and I think that many assistant development agencies could do maybe better and we can maybe program this better. So my last two slides are related to your key questions so what has Red Plus achieved and maybe Red Plus has not achieved what many actors have expected a decade ago rapid and cheap solutions to emission reductions in the tropical forest but maybe those expectations were simply unrealistic my takeaway message from this slide actually is that there are plenty of intermediate results of Red Plus and also a lot of investments that has been made by developing countries but Red Plus countries to actually move forward with those different elements. You have a number of figures here on the slide for example 40 countries are moving forward developing national forest monitoring systems quite impressive big exercise. I have talked about earlier about you know a progress in this development number of countries are looking into Red Plus and flag these synergies you know looking into illegal logging aspects into governance issues. Several countries are making big progress in safeguards and last but not least 50 plus countries have included Red Plus in the end assist commitment. So I think this is positive development and I'd like to argue that this recognition of this intermediate results is very important and specifically also a recognition of all the investments made by Red Plus countries and I think it's important for us to keep a momentum for change with this and I think I'll skip this. I just want to say that just to continue on the positive note Red Plus has some tailwind and I think that we need to continue this change and keep the momentum and there are some elements where I think you know some few thoughts for a future discussion you know technology and technology development which several speakers before me also pointed out and innovations and cost effectiveness can provide a lot of opportunities to accelerate Red Plus. Growing capacity in Red Plus countries I think this is very impressive and also the knowledge where to target interventions to actually trigger you know further capacity development and to keep the momentum to sustain and to institutionalize the Red Plus infrastructure. We know where this needs to be happening and we know how to do that. You know maybe also highlight you know the commitment of non-state actors and I think the Marrakesh partnership the climate action agenda you know a private sector, governance initiative cities you know there are plenty of players that are getting more and more aware and and yeah I think this is all good messages which I would recommend we don't forget about and we take this into into account. Thanks a lot for ending on a positive note I mean when we are discussing Red we can of course have the endless half full half empty glass discussion but clearly pointing to a number of tailwinds and maybe you shouldn't use this airplane metaphors if that if you should fly less but anyway we got the message. We have a last speaker that I would like to invite to the to the podium here Helen from the foundation in Philippines she is the indigenous representative of the or the observer at the GCF you had a long name an alternative alternative active observer I would like to thank the presenters for the very excellent presentations I think I will just I just want to raise some points and I'm not a red expert so my reflections might be coming from the point of view of a natural scientist and I think the point of view of a natural scientist but more from somebody from the community so first I think one of the things that I was looking for in the presentation is that the talk about human rights indigenous peoples rights I mean the remaining 80% of the remaining biodiversity in the world are in indigenous peoples territories where only 50% of them are managed and accessed by indigenous peoples indigenous peoples and 10% only 10% are being legally recognized that are owned by indigenous peoples so when we talk about forest we don't just talk about carbon and yeah we don't just talk about how it's going to mitigate climate change but we also talk as you have said sustainable livelihoods, communities and we also talk about tenure access who decides how the land is going to be, for what and when another thing is about evidence I like how each of you has presented the different evidences of what red plus has achieved so far but I think one of the questions I also want to see is that how has it changed people's lives in terms of empowerment what does it mean for an indigenous woman in the Cordillera that's my community to have such projects in their community and what about other unintended impacts for example, I know that red plus is a sticky issue for some communities and so what evidences or what are stories beyond the numbers that you have presented about unintended impacts of red plus for example division of communities or what does what does it do to reminialization for example environmental defenders another one is about participation participation the usual experience is that it talks about national government agencies meeting at the national capitol but what about community based for example monitoring and information systems I saw that the last presentation presented a very nice experience of how indigenous peoples are using drones to monitor their forest however unfortunately it's not the case for all countries so how is this going to be connected for example to behavior change that Joe has said for example in the Philippines we have the national greening program and the people would say oh we have to plant trees because we are going to get paid for it so how are this programs being connected to the forest yeah and the other thing is that I found well this is very personal I found that some of the presentations are very technical and I am wondering how this are communicated for example to communities who are actual managers of their forest and what does it mean to them all of these numbers I'd like to end by telling a story that the conditional cash transfer in the Philippines for example we went to one community and one of the chief of this village came and said because the conditions of the program is that they have to go to school 80% attendance of the children to school they have to do regular checkups and they have to attend monthly development sessions educational sessions of this of the beneficiaries and then they get some amount of money so he said I think if only we were consulted we would say can you instead of giving us cash can you give us horse and that horse should not be named should not be given to me but it should be given to the community and the people were laughing but then he continued to say that you know to comply with the conditions of the program and the schools are 3 km 4 km away from the village then how do you expect us to comply with the conditions of the program so instead of giving us cash give us horses because he said I know that giving us road might take some time so maybe horses can be horses are better so I will end with that and we'll be happy to continue this session you should sit thank you so much there were some questions asked but I think you will have time to also come back to this but I would like I mean most of the expertise is not sitting here but in the audience so I would like to invite questions or comments brief, introduce yourself if there are anyone would like to start there is a microphone coming good evening everybody I'm Pascal Martinez I'm working for the Global Environment Facility and we finance also part of this this process in particular phase 1 and 2 of the red plus and I found very interesting what you presented in this study in a very concise manner with a good picture and as we try to work with all the other partners and we're invited indeed by the COP also by the USACC to work together with GCF I was interested to see if in this study you were able to identify the countries that had made good use of several funding and could have better results because they could use several projects we try always to invite the countries to use any kind of funding especially when there are GCF so we would like to know if you have this kind of perception thank you thanks three more we start with Rauny good afternoon my name is Rauny Hajjo and one of the co-authors with Ireland also in the book which is being launched today my question is actually on the critical side of things well historically the Global North has donated and has different sorts of programs towards the south with a long list of requirements and so in also a very strict way of how the money is used what kind of results and also the whole notion of impact assessment emerges from the work of the World Bank especially with result-based payment there was a reverse of that logic so first a country obtains the result and then it's given the money as a sort of instant type to keep going and reducing without actually in theory too many strings attached to how the money is used but as we are seeing now some of that logic has also been questioned again so my question is are we not risking maybe putting so much of a strong burden in developing countries in terms of showing the results but also the effects and impacts of the money that's being now paid through these different schemes thank you so the question is are we if the you were asking about the impacts just to rephrase the question so it's just if we are both measuring and making payments based on results and also asking to measure the impact of the money donated based on the result are we not asking too much okay that would be a question for GCF where we have result-based payment based on the results but based on past results and then you ask also the money given for those results to have an impact that's kind of double not double counting but asking money to work twice there was one gentleman there sorry Marco and Nicol de Saint-Sélez-Jean at UCAM in Montreal I guess I just have a question about the donor the role that donors are playing in red and if there's any comment on the different type of guidance that's been provided by the World Bank Forest Carbon Partnership Facility and UNRED who was that to? that was for Malgo? for the panel okay there was some behind thank you and thank you for very good presentations I'm Peter Eversen from the Climate Change Secretariat I'm from the unit that are responsible for facilitating the technical assessments of the reference level and the results and of course we did start to talk about Red Plus already came on the agenda in 2005 but we also have to remember that the whole process in here takes some time so only last time we were in Poland in Warsaw did we have the rules about MRV and then only then could countries start to submit reference level and so this is five years now and every year we are receiving more reference level now reference level for Red Plus is covering almost 70% of the forest area in developing countries so we think this is quite a good achievement and in fact we will have a side event about lunchtime in one of the other side event rooms so this is more common, not really a question but of course we have to keep in mind that the decision making process in the COP is not as fast as we maybe sometimes would like but so countries of course have to wait until the decisions are there thanks lady over there okay maybe on the back okay there is centre representative to speak for her thank you from desert net international thank you very much for your very interesting talks and I would like to just ask Martin basically how close are we getting to achieving that the role of remote sensing is taken even more seriously to actually being sure that the reporting is closer to reality we know that we've had instances where for example I think it was 2016 Indonesia reported less deforestation than Ireland so I can't remember the source of this but I use it in my lectures quite a bit so are we getting closer now that we have radar data sent in us etc to actually being able to use that as a model policing that the reporting is actually closer to what actually happens on the ground thank you okay over here and we have one more and then we have to have a round of answers thank you very much I have a question a comment the question is also directed to whoever wants to tackle it countries treat forests very differently in their NDCs how that relates to red plus and red plus success in particular and also give us an overview of the different types of treating forests in NDCs and what your opinions are about that the comment is quick on the technology we run the hack for climate innovation program and have several projects that look at the land management space I just would encourage to look at it from a technological point of view I would encourage to look at pictures to include local sensing and particularly to apply artificial intelligence to make the most out of the data that you collect we have very interesting experiences on how AI can be applied with very interesting results looking at the past giving us indications in the future where deforestation is most likely to happen and therefore a way to prioritize development funds I think there are a couple of more but maybe I should draw a line and hopefully we get another round but maybe I can start as we did with Karma first if there are anything you would like to respond to for example that question raised by Rouni on countries Ecuador Brazil are now being paid for results at the same time the GCF requires that Rouni's money are spent on activities to further reduce which is not exactly the logic of result based payment or have I misunderstood or maybe Joe would like to join thank you actually I was going to in fact ask this question especially because as I was saying I'm not much into the technical technicalities of this and when I was asking about the result based payment within my own context to my country focal point before I I don't know the answer but I just wanted to ask the question myself to some of the experts here as the moderator pointed out most of the experts are within the audience and also here but just to get to the understanding of the result based payment for Bhutan I was told that it is not even worth going to the result based payment kind of a system because what we are going to be investing is not much going to have a return from that perspective so when we were I think our focal point is also trying to talk to the GCF in terms of the support I think the GCF has also opened up the support in terms of the three phases so from that perspective I don't have the answer but I just wanted to get some answer from this and secondly I would like to take the advantage of maybe the floor as well as the panelists to ask I just found out with one of the recent survey which was done by the Yale University and Columbia University in terms of the environmental performance how is there any linkage with the red survey when you do that how the information being when it is being used in the red survey or something like that to get the result on the performance of the environment or something like that this is I just wanted to ask because I was quite surprised to see when I looked at the result that was being published by this by this Columbia University and the Earth Science Bhutan is at the level of 137 ranking in the environment performance and this has shocked my I'm being asked my new government which has come into force recently why is that but I don't know because when I saw lots of presentation here in terms of the red in terms of trying to do the data gathering and also information gathering in terms of the sync and all from my perspective I was thinking that Bhutan we are trying to fight trying to remain carbon neutral we are negative when we have done the National Forestry Inventory has been done we are still in fact what we have recently submitted to the UNEPCC in terms of our sync in fact from that we have been able to engage in the cities even more and then relating to that even by this expert in terms of red I thought there was a linkage and this is just to take advantage of me not knowing anything on the red plus but from that perspective thank you sorry sorry for not being able to engage in Joe would you like to answer this the one I asked or any other you would like to respond to briefly yeah thank you so on the results based payment I'm not very sure Ronnie what your question is it's not meant to be a rant mechanism as you know it's analogous to an impact investment so you are investing for impact and you have to verify your impact so think about it and if you think about it perhaps in that context or within that framework maybe perhaps we can do a bilateral discussion but that might help to also provide some understanding and like Karma said the way it's being put together is that there is of course there are three phases and there is support also for building the MRBs so it's not as if it's yeah so perhaps we've discussed this a bit more with your permission I quickly actually do want to go to a couple of the points that I thought Helen made and maybe respond to that and I thought they were extremely well made because if you look at the evidence that's coming out so if you look at for example if you compare joint forestry management with community based management systems and state based management systems the evidence and the last that there was a systematic review that was done on this was I think in 2015 actually found that joint management systems are just far more effective that are shared between the community and the state what it did find and this sort of and this agrees with a whole lot of other studies as well is that the impact of this if all you're looking at is poverty is actually not very much so it's very close to zero but also in terms of forest forest impact it's very little so it's right in the middle of the range that Amy presented between zero to zero point five actually the meta analysis shows zero point two one so it's right in the middle and it really begs the question should we not be looking at cost effectiveness studies far more and also be looking at the core benefits very few studies look at core benefits and we have to start targeting those if we want to think of these as investments interestingly also for red plus countries so I think it's 47 countries where red plus has gone evidence only exists in 24 or good quality evidence only exists in 24 of those so just half so I think a lot of the questions that you're asking are right on the money and then the one more question and then I'm going to go back to the moderator on your question Peter I think on how does how do we look at the different treatment of red plus programs in NDCs it's so at least to the GCF it's country owned the country determines as to what is included as part of their NDCs of course but also what's included in terms defining what is part of the red plus and the GCF then takes that on the GCF does provide scientific advice but after that it backs off great Amy Helen ask a question how has red changed people's lives okay there are a lot of other questions that were up for other panels but I want to thank Helen for those observations first of all I mean it was a great time and as a discussant and was listening and reflecting really spontaneously so thank you for that and again also like Joe a lot of what you said completely resonated with what we're learning and seeing and something I didn't mention that I think is absolutely important is this question of participation and what we have seen I mean not only for let's say interventions labeled red plus but really any forest conservation interventions and looking at reviews of these kinds of things that really genuine engagement of local people is still a frontier for implementers and those who are trying to engage communities and what we've seen is that I mean oftentimes you know we all know communities are heterogeneous there are wealthier people there are men there are women there are there are different power dynamics within those communities and there is a strong risk of enhancing inequities that already exist those who are more articulated often men the ones who are more aware of interventions happening in the communities as opposed to women and poor households and this is something that I didn't mention that we did see and then how is red plus changing people's lives well I don't know I mean I think you know at least what we've seen so far is that a lot of the let's say well-being impacts are incipient and some of that is simply because of you know red plus and some of these interventions really didn't move as quickly as we had hoped and so you aren't actually getting a lot of action on the ground and to the local people who are really the ultimate beneficiaries of all of this and not only beneficiaries but also should be considered you know co-implementers I think that's when you said this we don't want cash give us horses I mean I can't tell you how many times we've heard that in the field you know not those exact words but that kind of idea so listening to what people actually need and what can support role development and what can engage them meaningfully in these processes is absolutely keen it's really not happening can I just you're working with proponents are they happy to be evaluated with the risk of you coming out and say sorry your co-project had no impact Amy are they happy to be assessed by your asking me questions no I mean I think impact evaluation is extremely sensitive and I think that's also why we don't see a lot of randomization you know something like randomization where you're randomizing treatment I mean this is highly sensitive especially if you're not an implementer and and I think I mean you know Joe is working on this now I mean leading a learning oriented real-time impact assessment of GCF funded projects and I mean I think the whole idea of when you're coming into evaluated and working with implementers is a partnership and a collaboration and so it's not calling people out for things they're doing wrong but understanding the challenges that we're all working towards the same thing actually and the point I mean what we're trying to do and I guess what Joe's trying to do too is really providing you know a platform for learning and constructive feedback to be able to improve these efforts Martin you had a few questions but maybe summarize if I try to summarize it is you and Margot pointed out that we have increased the capacity a lot of information is that being used to change policies yeah I think that was kind of the end point that I wanted to end up is there is more information satellite data are used so all red plus countries are using satellite data for their reporting free and open satellite data we have more opportunities European free and open data sources there is you know machine learning and artificial intelligence I mean there's a lot of stuff that is happening it's a very dynamic sector there is more opportunities than what we see but the pledge was really I think we have to be better in using that data really to get to action we have focused a lot on trying to report what's supposed to come out at the end but very little to actually really support action and I think there's much more that can be done and we have to think quite differently on how we can use of the data how we can use the data with the right people and that kind of stuff so that's where I see the biggest impact of these new evolving things that are happening and of course if you have something open and transparent right you will have diversity that's just that's an unfortunate downside of it if you have only one data set then okay you have one number if you have two data sets that doesn't necessarily agree with the first one but that's an effect that you have but there are ways to deal with that we have expert guidance developed there is some things on how we can advise people to deal with that but that should not deviate us from the main objectives we should really use it to underpin action Malgo I don't agree with that Thanks Harold and I think I would agree and my answer to your question would be yes in a short way but I just want to reflect on a few other things which were raised here earlier if I got your question right I think there was something about the view from donors and we are not a donor and maybe there are some donors in the room so someone may wish to comment on this but you were also asking about the application of different guidelines FCPF and UNRED so UNRED per se does not have any own guidelines we are fully aligned with UNFCCC process and then I want to pick up on Helen's comments and I also try to highlight this in my own presentation and thanks Helen also for bringing this up I have presented an example of a one-time intervention a case of Panama but I fully agree that we really need to scale up and we need to know how to do the scaling and I think we have still some work to do on this and some homework to do and I think this program the scalable components from the very early stages of our program and projects design and I think that's something what's really necessary and then there was one more comment I think from Pascal here on different sources of funding and from our perspective from UNRED and different agencies supporting a number of countries just a full range of funding that is being considered and a lot of mobilization of private sector and private funds and I think that's the only way to move forward to have RED Plus transformational and I'm going to stop here we have to stop very soon just one last question for Helen here in the book we claim that RED has provided a platform for indigenous peoples to raise issues to raise them and talk on the national agenda would you give RED credit for this? Well I think we cannot fault indigenous peoples and local communities in maybe becoming critical in many climate change initiatives because most well I would say most of the time many of these initiatives are usually top down and are being imposed in communities but I think for RED Plus it has opened up a platform for indigenous peoples to raise their issues but in terms of how effective and how it's going to really change communities and people's lives this is something that we still need to look into like apart from carbon what core benefits are communities really taking or benefiting from all of these initiatives and we have a lot and we have to close now because you're told we have to finish by 8 last word by Christoph Well just very briefly thanks for being here we want to provide you a little bit with some results based payments so we have some lunch sorry dinner lunch tomorrow now dinner now if you just walk out the back door again on the other in the next room there is some sort of room with tables and there should be some food I hope last time we promised it and then we didn't have it but this time I think it's there so thanks for being here and thanks for all the speakers and I hope you help me giving them a clap of hands so I appreciate and see you over there